Thursday, January 26, 2017

There are moments when you know a Presidency is over. That moment when you see the Man, overwhelmed by the office. The narrative is lost, the grand visions and promises abandoned in a fruitless effort to control events; which at that moment have taken control of him, and irrevocably derailed a Presidency.

For President Reagan it was the moment cameras caught him being coached by the first lady to answer a reporter's question.

For President Carter it was the moment the mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran came to a crashing halt in the middle of the desert.

For President Lyndon Johnson, it was the moment he realized the overwhelming majority of Americans , and the verdict of history would hold him responsible for the war in Vietnam.

For President Nixon, it was the, desperate hubris of the "I'm not a crook", speech.

Yesterday, January 25th 2017, five days after his inauguration, the Presidency of Donald John Trump came crashing down around him. Not in the private agony of the Oval Office, or some back room high atop Trump Tower, but live on Television, in front of the whole world.

The way President Trump tells it, the meandering, falsehood-filled, self-involved speech that he gave at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters was one of the greatest addresses ever given.

“That speech was a home run,” Trump told ABC News just a few minutes into his first major television interview since moving into the White House. “See what Fox said. They said it was one of the great speeches. They showed the people applauding and screaming. … I got a standing ovation. In fact, they said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl, and they said it was equal. I got a standing ovation. It lasted for a long period of time.”

The lengthy interview, which aired late Wednesday night, provided a glimpse of the president and his state of mind on his fifth full day in office. It revealed a man who is obsessed with his own popularity and eager to provide evidence of his likability, even if that information doesn't match reality.

I could go on and cite more of the WaPo article , but honestly it doesn't even begin to capture the magnitude of the moment. It is something that must be seen. Not just to be understood, but to be believed.

If Donald Trump was just a real estate developer, or a reality show host, or a product pitch man, yesterday's interview would be amusing. Fodder for the inside pages of a New York tabloid. Just another celebrity anecdote about a man desperate to affirm his own grandiose image of himself. A self-perception that he must defend at all costs. Defend it against anything that threatens his core belief that he is the greatest, the smartest, the most "tremendous" and successful man that ever lived.

But Donald Trump isn't just another insecure celebrity. He is the 45th President of the United States. The Commander-in-Chief of the United States Military, and the man who has the sole power to order the use of America's arsenal of the most destructive weapons mankind has ever constructed

Five days in his Presidency, Donald Trump is mentally, emotionally and physically incapable of getting past the fact that fewer people attended his swearing in than that of Barack Obama. Five days into his Presidency, Donald Trump is mentally, emotionally and physically incapable of getting past the fact that Hillary Clinton won more votes than he did. Five days into his Presidency Donald Trump is mentally, emotionally and physically incapable of getting past even the most routine public criticisms that all Presidents face on a daily basis.

His Presidency has collapsed into an obsession to convince himself that his inauguration was the biggest ever, to convince himself that he really did win the popular vote; all at the expense of actual governing. His administration is currently operating with a skeleton staff at the National Security Agency. His administration is currently operating with NO sitting ambassadors at any of our embassies around the world, as he demanded that all serving diplomatic heads from the Obama Administration vacate their posts by the moment he finished taking the oath.

Foreign Policy is reduced to a desperate spewing on Twitter that the refusal of the Mexican President to meet with him was a "mutual decision".

All the while the President's surrogates are left to try to spin some sort of coherence out of this madness. Reduced to claiming their provably false statements are not lies, but rather "Alternative Facts."

I did not vote for President Trump, but like many Americans I did "give him a chance". I tuned in from halfway around the world to hear his inaugural address. Desperate to hear any evidence that his man understood the office he was elected to, what I heard instead was political rally boilerplate, the same divisive rhetoric that defined his campaign.

It was the speech of a sore winner.

In the first television interview as President of the United States, Donald Trump showed the world that not only is he a sore winner, but more than that, he is a dangerously insecure narcissist who will at some point, completely self destruct under the weight of the Presidency. We all can only hope the expression of that involves the use social media, and not nuclear weapons.